


nothing but yellow love

by tinydragon (tiny_dragon)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 22:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10863045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_dragon/pseuds/tinydragon
Summary: the anniversary of bianca's death is approaching and nico is finding it very hard to feel things





	nothing but yellow love

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this while listening to yellow love by citizen if u want to enhance ~the mood~

Someone once told Nico that grief hurt like an open wound. That after time the skin would heal and stitch itself together, and it’d close. It’d scar, but it would heal.

He doesn’t really think it’s anything like that at all. If it is, there’s something not quite right with his skin. Someone cut him open with a very sharp knife, all those years ago, when they took Bianca, and the stitches have never quite held no matter how many times people have tried to sew them back together.

Grief is more like a hole. Missing puzzle piece, bullet wound. No blood, and no tearing, just a blank space and a disappeared part as if nothing was ever there at all.

Invisible illness, something that doesn’t look like it should hurt but it really does.

There’s a part of him. And even though it hurts all the time, he’s not entirely sure where it was placed. A chunk of bone in his shoulder, a patch of skin on his knees, thin and bruised and bony. Just underneath his heart, between his rib cage, between the tips of his toes. There is a part of him where Bianca was before, and she isn’t now.

It hurts every day. Sometimes it hurts more than others.

On the week approaching the anniversary of her death – five years, five fucking years, half the time he’d actually had to spend with her –

Although that’s a lie, because they’d had years and years and years stuck in limbo. Nico thinks that maybe he’d have been content to stay there forever, if he’d had her, his sister. If she’d never been taken away, and there had never been anything to lose.

But on the week approaching that day, the bad day, when shadows hang over his heart and something that’s always cold feels even colder, he’s lying in the dark with Will Solace.

They do this sometimes. Take naps in the day between Will’s infirmary shifts. Nico isn’t very good at sleeping at night. And Jason continually knocks on the door and coughs really stupidly, to make sure that, ahem, no  _ shifty business _ is occurring (it never is), but it’s nice. Being with Will like this.

Soft, dark, gentle. Someone’s hand in the dark, someone who has warm skin, and is always looking to slot his fingers in between Nico’s. Feels safe in the bedsheets, which is a wonder in itself. For years the land of dreams has felt like a prison sentence.

Please don’t let me dream about Bianca again.

Will trails his fingers along the soft scape of Nico’s skin. Nico breathes and he wants to feel something. He should feel something, in his safe place, with the boy who he loves with everything in him that’s gold. Everything in him that’s colour. Everything in him that isn’t shadow and dark things.

But he doesn’t feel anything.

He feels this weight, the heavy weight of a heart dragging him down.

When someone dies, grief attaches itself in the form of iron hooks around your heart and pulls you down, down, down. Into the darkness or into the ocean, and then it’s a competition to see which drowns you first.

Unless someone pulls you out of the water. That’s what happened to Nico. He pulled himself out.

Sometimes he can still feel that weight.

“Nico?” Will whispers into the dark. They don’t need to whisper but Will likes to, because it feels like the middle of the night, feels like sneaking out even if the sun is streaking pale light in through the cabin windows, no matter how hard Nico tries to shut it out with his curtains.

Will thinks that he has fallen asleep.

“Mmm.” Nico replies with a murmur, face half-hidden underneath the duvet.

He wants this moment to be different: warm breath on his skin, a giggle splattered across his arms, his cheeks, his chest. He wants to feel something. He wants to squeeze Will’s hand or guess the stupid shapes that he’s drawing into the skin of his wrist.

He wants to tell Will, but how do you tell someone something like that? How do you tell them, listen, I normally love you, but right now I can’t feel anything at all?

(If he lets himself feel, the water will fall in – crash, thunder clap against the surface, and drown him, pull him under. And then it’ll drown the world.)

“You’re quiet,” Will notes. Squeezes his hand. He’s learned how to decode the silent spaces Nico leaves in conversation. Half of the things he wants to say, he can’t.

There’s a certain silence for Tartarus. There’s another kind for when he hates himself. A whole other for black days, a small whimper for when he’s not good enough for Will.

The loudest kind of quiet is a quiet that is filled with Bianca and the spaces where she should be, but she isn’t.

“I’m trying to sleep,” Nico grumbles, even though he isn’t and he tries to say it teasingly, but he can’t even do that, really.

His tone flat. Something in his head saying, just leave him, just tell Will to go away forever.

It doesn’t matter what he does or how much he loves you or if he kisses you goodbye. He’ll never be able to keep a promise.

“I, uh,” Will pauses. Nico is half splayed out underneath the reach of his arm, while the other one runs circles around his hand. Will can probably feel Nico tense in his hold. Will can probably feel all of Nico’s cold trying to worm into his body, and take away all of his warm. “I saw the date, I mean. You said this time of year was hard. The time that’s coming up, and I, um, I just wanted,” a swallow, a squeeze. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be here, through all of this.”

“Oh,” Nico’s voice cracks.

He tries to think about the last time he spent this time, that day, coming up, three days, he might die – with someone else, in anybody else’s company but the dead. Skulking around the underworld, summoning skeletons, in a futile attempt at a glimpse.

When you miss someone so much you’d give anything to see them again, even the bits that you never got to see before. Even just the whitewashed bones and the skull smile that should be saved for Halloween costumes.

That kind of missing someone.

“I usually spend it on my own,” Nico tells him, even though he meant to say, “it’s fine.”

It’s not fine, he supposes. Not really fine at all.

“And that’s ok,” Will tells him. Squeezes his hand again. Like he’s saying, I’m here I’m here I’m here, over and over.

I’m here, and you are too. You’re ok.

“But if you do want some company – well, you know how to find me.”

“Yeah?”

Will nods. Nico feels the brush of his curls as his head shakes and the mop of messy blonde bounces in the shadows.

This time Nico is the one who squeezes his hand. Gentle, just a touch. If Nico keeps hold of him, then maybe he’ll be able to keep his head above the icy cold water for a while. It’s not because it’s Will, it’s because it’s someone.

When someone that you love goes away, everything turns to nothing and you turn to shadow bit by bit by bit. The gap in your body, in soul and skin gets bigger and bigger and bigger. First you drown in the dark and then in the sea and then in nothing at all. If one person is your entire world then it doesn’t take a lot to create the end of everything.

Something inside of him shifted that day. Since then, everything has been reworking, trying to figure how to exist again.

Maybe some company wouldn’t be too bad this year. To wash the rust off of the anchor and remind him how to breathe. Hold his hand and kiss his cheek in the dark.

“That might be nice,” Nico whispers.

He doesn’t realise he’s crying until Will does, and he turns over on his side and presses this kiss, gentle and touch and only feather there, against his cheek. Only for a minute.

Only for a minute.

**Author's Note:**

> hope u enjoyed this, it is a bit of a mess bc i am currently a bit of a mess, but i hope it was still nice to read???
> 
> i am on tumblr at willsolaced please come and give me ideas and feedback, thank u


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